John Hill, director at the Office of Financial Innovation & Transformation in the Bureau of Fiscal Service, discusses using technology to achieve cross agency priority goals, and how the office’s experiments with blockchain and automation are progressing.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service is working on several of the cross-agency priority goals in the President’s Management Agenda. Right now, the bureau is investing in new technologies to shift employees to more high-level work. John Hill, director at the Office of Financial Innovation & Transformation in the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, says that Robotic Process Automation is instrumental in this effort.

“They are best suited for repetitive, rules-based tasks, mostly in our accounts payment and accounts receivable areas, as well as invoice processing. We’re finding tasks where the robot can free up the human worker to do higher value, much more rewarding and enjoyable tasks,” Hill said. “We implemented them in an area where the workload was growing rapidly. It’s a shared service operation, we’re getting more customers every month. Workload is going up, employees are overworked, and they’re looking for ways to improve their productivity. It really was a perfect combination of factors that led to this success”